What Actually Counts as Work Experience (And How We Can Make It Count)
These days, the job hunting experience can get pretty taxing. As a student, you may be eyeing this cool internship or a new entry-level position, but once you read through the details and requirements, you realize that you more or less need a laundry list of experiences and achievements to be considered.
To get experience, you need experience.
Frustrating to hear, right? This might leave you distraught or even fearful about your career journey, and that’s valid! Cheer up, though, because there’s hope!
While it may not seem like it right now, you most likely have substantial experience that can translate to skills and potential that are valued by your target companies. However, you may be quick to dismiss the work you’ve done as a student because it doesn’t match the standards of a typical professional engagement. Maybe your experiences weren’t paid, or they don’t seem to be “legit” enough, but stay with us for a little while, and you’ll find out how to present yourself as the ideal candidate despite a supposed lack of “experience.”
What is experience, anyway?
Contrary to popular, misguided belief, experience covers more than formal responsibilities in a workplace or a salaried job. Not everything you put on a resume has to be paid, prestigious, or prominent, especially if you’re still a high school or college student. Remember that experience can encompass anything you’ve worked on, participated in, or learned from. When you shift to this perspective, your horizons are widened, and the job search journey won’t feel as daunting as it used to be. Here are five key involvements that count for quite a lot, along with some tips to make them count.
Campus organizations
It’s no secret that school organizations are practically mini-companies, especially on the university scale. With the numerous processes to remember, initiatives to take part in, and opportunities to learn more about a specific interest or area, joining organizations in school will surely provide you with relevant roles, soft and hard skills, and experiences that can prepare you for the workforce. Best of all, campus organizations are often overflowing with a variety of projects and positions! This means you can dabble into fields like finance, external relations, project management, and more while having people to freely seek guidance from.
How this translates in a resume: Organizations have various titles for just about every role! Member, deputy, project head, committee member, analyst, manager — you name it, there’s probably an org position title for that! On your resume, indicate your position name alongside your organization. Depending on how known your organization is, feel free to briefly describe its purpose so that recruiters can have more context on what you’ve worked on.
Volunteering
If your school isn’t big on organizations or you prefer to delve into external opportunities, volunteering is something to consider! Given its broadness, you can do just about anything — from teaching young kids something new to offering your time and skills for a good cause. Volunteering also gives you the avenue to explore your advocacies and passions, which can pave the way for your further development not only as a worker but also as a human being.
Holistic growth is always the goal, so if you’re looking to make the world a better place with baby steps, consider long-term volunteering for a nonprofit organization or any other similar institutions — hospitals, churches, shelters, orphanages, and more.
How this translates in a resume: Key examples of volunteering you can talk about in your resume would include tutoring, content creation, or simply “volunteering” with specific details on your tasks (Did you organize a fundraiser? Led a team of volunteers? Planned an outreach event?)
Self-started projects
Can’t seem to find a perfect fit in organizations or groups on campus and beyond? Maybe you can create something of your own! Whether this is a blog, YouTube channel, online store, creative output, or anything else, there’s no shortage in skills and experiences to pick up from being a self-starter. Passion projects or whatever you can do on your own can show organizational skills, initiative, ownership, and accountability, which are incredibly attractive to employers.
Disclaimer: While starting something of your own is an admirable feat, do know that this is not necessary to guarantee a stellar resume! If you’d like to start your own business, organization, or personal platform, do so out of passion and interest instead of simply trying to pad your resume. For organizations, especially, there’s already a significant sense of oversaturation, so try your best to stand out through other means.
How this translates in a resume: You may call yourself a founder, creator, or CEO for your self-started project depending on the nature of your work. Outline your preparation processes to showcase a distinct form of experience that comes with starting something of your own.
Competitions
Feeling like putting yourself and your skills to the test, all while learning something new? Join competitions! While it takes a good amount of time and preparation to succeed in competitive environments, participating in a competition is often a more short-term commitment compared to joining campus organizations, volunteering, or starting something of your own.
Don’t get us wrong, though! Despite any difference in length, a competition is bound to give you the same fulfillment as any other experience mentioned above, especially if you’re genuinely interested in what you’re learning and doing. If you manage to win big, your accolades can distinguish you from a sea of applicants. Competition participation can show an employer your dedication to the field and diligence in your work.
How this translates in a resume: Competitions and respective awards can be indicated on either your work experience or awards sections. As you’re looking to beef up your resume due to a lack of conventional work experience, you’d be better off including competition participation in the former section. You may call yourself a delegate, representative, participant, or any special title given to you by the competition. As always, feel free to describe the competition’s premise, along with the time and measures you’ve taken to prepare yourself (e.g. you can indicate how many hours you’ve trained for every week).
Academic work
Bet this wasn’t something you expected to be able to file on your resume as experience! If you’ve exhausted all aforementioned options and still feel like you’ve fallen short, listing down your roles and responsibilities in major academic projects may give you the boost you need.
It’s undeniably easy to feel like the work you’ve done in school holds little to no value, but as you dig a little deeper, you’re bound to realize that you’ve picked up relevant skills and experience from the sheer variety of academic work you’ve done. From research papers you’ve written to even school-mandated businesses you’ve created, there ought to be something worth jotting down on your resume. So, take a trip down memory lane (read: your old files on Google Drive) and ask yourself when and where you’ve made some impact or shown some leadership within the four walls of your classroom.
How this translates in a resume: You can add “leader” to one of your job experience blurbs if you led the development of a particular research paper or any other project. For more unconventional projects like small businesses, you can indicate the role/s you’ve taken across other project teams (marketing, finance, production, the list goes on!). As always, ensure you give ample context on what you’ve worked on in any academic project you hope to include in your resume, especially since projects of this nature will likely be more niche than usual.
Final thoughts
With impostor syndrome and hustle culture rampant among students, it gets far too easy to feel inferior or behind in the job search process if you have yet to secure an internship or paid position at a known company.
High school and college students may believe that they can’t do much work due to age and experience constraints, but clearly, this is far from the case. Experience is everywhere, and the aforementioned categories are bound to serve as stepping stones for students to reach their dream opportunities.
On the other side, though, experience isn’t the only thing that determines one’s success in the job-hunting process. Values and soft skills play a huge role as well. However, if one involves themselves across the previously mentioned areas, they’ll surely gain the necessary knowledge, mentality, and of course, the experience they’ll need to thrive in the ever-competitive labor force.
About the Author
Ally De Leon is a Growth and Marketing Mission Specialist at KadaKareer. She’s a freshman studying Communications Technology Management (which is just an SEO-unfriendly way to say marketing) at the Ateneo de Manila University. She’s at her happiest whenever she writes about any thought or feeling without getting mental blocks, reads a book she can highlight all over, eats anything with a borderline unhealthy amount of cheese, and hears Jeong Jaehyun’s voice in NCT songs.
About KadaKareer
KadaKareer is a career development platform for underserved students in the Philippines hoping to launch their digital careers. “Kada” comes from the word barkada, which means a group of friends. We are a Filipino student’s cheerleader, coach, and support group throughout their entire career journey!
